In Syria, What’s Left Behind?

The young Syrian rebel fighter kicked in the locked apartment doors with ease. Some yielded after two or three firm blows. Others required a bit more effort, but all eventually surrendered.

His small band of a few men moved through the abandoned homes, looking for food and new places to base their brigade. The neighborhood, Bustan al-Basha, one of the many frontlines in the city of Aleppo, was empty, save for the stray cats rummaging through piles of trash, and the hundreds of rebels who, over the summer, had been drawn by the fighting into the city from the poorer rural towns and villages surrounding it. Only three residents remained, in a place that was once home to thousands. There were signs of civilian life everywhere but no life anywhere, no need to fear an awkward conversation with an occupant. The only civilians the rebels chanced upon were the dead, rotting in their homes.

It’s unsettling, a voyeuristic violation, to walk through people’s homes uninvited—to peer into their lives, their living rooms, their kitchen cabinets. I sat at a dusty kitchen table with “Happy Easter” cushions on its seats, walked through rooms with intricate, gold-lettered Koranic verses adorning the walls. Where were all these people now?

I stood in what was a little girl’s bedroom but was now a sniper’s nest. A fist-sized gunman’s peephole had been punched into the wall above her pine headboard. Her clothes were still in a dresser. A class photo was tossed on her cheap gray Formica desk, along other items; a small purple toy car, a beige teddy bear with a pink bow tie, an abacus, a pink plastic thermos and a pink schoolbag. She’d left some of her toys behind, or perhaps all of them. Did she plead with her parents to bring along her teddy bear?

Which one of the twenty-five children in the photo was she? The children, dressed in identical gray knee-length smocks with red collars for the girls, black collars for the boys, looked to be about six- or seven-years-old. But then, the photo was dated 2008. Is that why it was left behind—maybe for a newer class photo. How did her family decide what to take and what to leave, what was essential and what was merely baggage?

War is in many ways about things that are left behind—people, items, ideas, innocence. It ages children before their time, turns neighbors into enemies (or family), it destroys communities and leaves scars that may or may not show.

The confidently authoritarian Syria that existed before March 15, 2011 has eroded, its brutal decades-old secular pan-Arab regime is fighting for its existence. It will likely eventually go the way of other brutal decades-old secular pan-Arab regimes, like Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, to be replaced by a more religiously conservative, Sunni Muslim power structure of some sort.

While the old Middle East ideologies are being left behind (through greater or lesser degrees of violence), some of their autocratic tendencies haven’t been. Islamist Mohammad Morsi’s Egypt is not a bastion of freedom, Tunisia’s Salafists are trying to impose their conservative views on others and Libya’s many militias are still vying for influence and power. Still, change takes time. Replacing ideas is an evolution (although sometimes, some would say, it’s a devolution), not merely a revolution.

The conflict in Aleppo, meanwhile, grinds on in a battle for streets and street corners. In other parts of the north, as Syria enters a new year of turmoil, the rebels have made greater advances, snatching towns and roads from the Assad regime. But here, the fight is slower, eroding what was once a proud cosmopolis—Syria’s commercial hub.

For now, the little girl still had her room in Bustan al-Basha, if or when her family decided to return. Other residents weren’t so lucky. Many of the neighborhood’s four- and five-story residential buildings had been sliced open, their concrete floors pancaked atop each other, their contents—washing machines, couches, dining tables —spewed into dusty mounds onto the streets below.

As I walked through the neighborhood, I thought of my late maternal grandparents, who had lived through neighboring Lebanon’s fifteen years of civil sectarian bloodletting, ending in 1990. They, too, had fled their home in haste, leaving everything. They returned to find their three-story house a pile of rubble. “We couldn’t even retrieve a fork,” my grandmother had told me. My mother doesn’t have any childhood photos, any posed class pictures with her schoolmates—they were left behind, lost, destroyed.

My sweet, proudly stubborn grandfather cleared the rubble of his home and rebuilt it—only to have it demolished and to lose everything a second time. He may have lived through another conflict, in another country, in another time, but the loss was like that experienced by many Syrians. He persevered, piled stone upon stone and rebuilt it, this time doubling the thickness of the first floor in the hope that should it be bombed again, something would remain. War or no war, he was determined to bequeath a floor to each of his three sons, and land to his four daughters—to leave something behind. The house, now in its third incarnation, is still standing.

There’s a saying in Arabic that we offer to console in times of material loss: “Kuloo be yit’awad”—Everything can be compensated and replaced. But photos are more than things; a child’s toys are more than things, political ideologies mean a way of life not just an idea on paper, and apartment doors that have been kicked in reflect more than just the quality of the lock.

Rania Abouzeid covers Syria for Time magazine. You can follow her on Twitter at @raniaab.